Mitch Kapor has been at the forefront of the information technology revolution for a generation as an entrepreneur, investor, social activist, and philanthropist.

Most recently, Mr. Kapor founded Foxmarks, an upcoming search engine based on bookmarks and related metadata. He received a B.A. from Yale College in 1971 and studied psychology, linguistics, and computer science as part of a major in Cybernetics. He attended the Sloan School of Management at MIT before leaving for a Silicon Valley startup. Mr. Kapor founded Lotus Development Corp. in 1982 and with Jonathan Sachs created Lotus 1-2-3, which made the PC ubiquitous in business in the 1980's.

In 1990, he co-founded the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He founded the Mitchell Kapor Foundation in 1997 and the Open Source Applications Foundation in 2001. He became the founding Chair of the Mozilla Foundation in 2003 and is a trustee of the Level Playing Field Institute. From 1994-1996, he served as Adjunct Professor at the MIT Media Lab. From 1999 to 2001, Mr. Kapor was a partner at Accel. In 2006, he became an Adjunct Professor at the School of Information at Berkeley. Mr. Kapor has contributed pieces on information infrastructure policy, intellectual property, and antitrust in the digital era topublications such as Scientific American, The New York Times, and Forbes.

Serial entrepreneur Mitch Kapor speaks about the fundamental principles of building successful companies by drawing on his experience as creator of Lotus 1-2-3, Chairman of Second Life, Founder of Foxmarks and a wealth of technical and social entrepreneurship knowledge. Kapor emphasizes the elements of company building that technology has changed, such as faster feedback cycles and lower barriers to entry, as well as the elements that remain the same, such as how to establish culture and trust. Kapor illuminates his observations with contemporary and historical examples that create a context-rich primer on building vibrant companies.

Serial entrepreneur Mitch Kapor encourages start-ups not to compete with giants. Instead, the young upstart should consider how it could benefit by working in concert with their giant's footsteps. He cites as an example his own young enterprise, Foxmarks, which tracks search trends through the amalgamation of Firefox bookmarks.

A solid business model can't survive long-term if it just draws traffic. Serial entrepreneur Mitch Kapor points out that a concrete business plan must truly offer a solution to a well-worn market conundrum. While a flash-in-the-pan Facebook app may draw millions of users in minutes, without staying power it's not viable long term.

While entrepreneur and former Lotus 1-2-3 founder Mitch Kapor understands how selling finance can boost a burgeoning enterprise, his experience has also acquainted him with some of the disadvantages - mainly accountability and a forced schedule of progress. Here, Kapor outlines some of the many alternatives to the traditional VC paradigm, including self-financing and angel funding.

Selecting a financial partner for your growing enterprise should be as careful a process as selecting a member of your senior staff, says serial entrepreneur Mitch Kapor. Here he discusses why real start-ups offering real opportunity can afford to be choosy.

Former Lotus 1-2-3 founder Mitch Kapor has launched a number of new ventures, and he knows firsthand the difficulty of competing with the Valley's best-known brands for top engineering and executive talent. He shares his solutions to luring the best in human resources to his door, including distributed development and opening doors elsewhere in the Golden Gate.

Former Lotus 1-2-3 founder Mitch Kapor speaks candidly about the most valuable legacy of his wildly successful 1980's technology company: the management of free-thinking creatives. He stands by the quality of his products, but it was his huge investment in human resources, Libertarian management style, and incentives toward great job satisfaction and accountability that he's most proud of. He claims that the thousands of Lotus alumni have helped set the standard for how tech companies are managed on the East Coast and beyond.

Mitch Kapor has been an entrepreneur since the 1980's, and here he pinpoints useful websites, educational programs, and learning opportunities that help level the playing field between seasoned venture capitalist and the first-time business operator.